It’s reasonable to be concerned about carcinogens. It’s reasonable to be concerned about pesticides in our blood streams, particulate matter in our lungs and microplastics small enough to pass through our cell walls...
But before seeking help, my concern was more of an all consuming dread. The only way to keep that dread at a barely tolerable level was to expel as many contaminants as possible from my shopping basket and home in the hopes of minimising exposure to these omnipresent dangers. If I ever “slipped up” or “caved” and bought something with plastic packaging, the sense of “wrongness” and “failure” would linger days after the trip to the shops.
Supermarkets were excruciating for me. Weighing up the benefits of bottled, non-organic passata (glass good, pesticides bad) versus organic whole tomatoes in a plastic lined tin (organic good, plastic bad) was a painful exercise. There was no Right Choice. No pure choice. And shopping in the company of my wife was a disaster. If the time I took to agonise over every choice didn’t suck all the joy out of the time spent together, the scornful looks I’d shoot at the things she placed casually in the shopping basket did. I’d grab each item and painstakingly scan the ingredients, disapproval oozing from every pore. Each additive, trans-fat, or emulsifier was just another failure on her part to be a thoughtful consumer and steward of our bodies. It was so unpleasant for the both of us that finally I took total control of grocery shopping and went alone.
Despite my dad nicknaming me “Monica” as a kid (after the fastidious control-freak from F.R.I.E.N.D.S), I have only taken Obsessive Compulsive Disorder seriously in the last three or so years.
It started when my wife was officially diagnosed with OCD in 2021. She is nothing like Monica Geller. While that might surprise you, that’s only because OCD has been misconstrued for so long. While my contamination, “just right” and scrupulousness obsessions can be a part of OCD (and they are the more outwardly obvious ones), intrusive thoughts are the submerged part of the OCD iceberg. And that is what Deb suffers from the most. Her suffering was so acute and her diagnosis so fresh, that wondering out loud about my own OCD felt inappropriate. We were so different. Perhaps I had been misusing the term myself!
Long story short, we now agree (as do our therapists) that we both have OCD. It just shows up differently in each of us. Nevertheless, we share a deep understanding of the condition and can help each other through moments where we have to white knuckle our worst fears - like the time Deb traipsed soft fragrant dog shit throughout the entire house and trod it deep into the weave of the carpet. An event I have come to call the “poo-pocalypse” because of the intense meltdown it provoked in me as I desperately fought against my meds to fulfil my cleaning compulsions and restore order to our home.
The reason I’m telling you all this is because of a far more serious kind of apocalypse…
In Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it feels as if the apocalypse has already struck. But unlike your classic Hollywood apocalypse, it wasn’t a mass extinction event and the whole population is still there trying to get by in the rubble.
It’s hard to explain how broken the city is…
In Kinshasa, it’s safer to drink Sprite or Coca Cola than water. And the only water you should consider drinking is bottled (plastic bad). In the absence of waste removal services, discarded water bottles create a scaly pavement on the dusty roadsides where they’ve been crushed under foot - the faint blue of plastic peeking through the muck. My colleagues and I drive past a river choked so badly by these plastic bottles that it’s caught fire and thick plumes of black smoke rise from the flames.
Imagine that… Kinshasa is the kind of place where rivers can set alight.
The rattling vehicles on the roads of the city are made of threadbare metal - panel beaten to mottled infinity after countless collisions in the death-wish of Congolese traffic. At one point our driver literally ramps the central island between the two sides of the highway and drives into oncoming traffic to overtake the funeral procession of a recently deceased preacher.
The vehicles here make the ones in Mad Max look lush. By the smell of the black smoke that spews from their rusted exhaust pipes, I imagine they run on the low-quality fuel exports reserved just for African countries. The type that’s laced with high levels of toxic substances (sulphur and benzene bad). The fumes shroud the city and give a yellow tint to the light. They turn my snot pure black. Even the highly refined brioche buns sold on the side of the road taste like petrol.
In this dysfunctional context, there is no room for human-centred design. No rest for the eye or the soul. There are just never-ending rows of unfinished development. Leaning walls of grey concrete and exposed steel rods. Shabby shells born out of necessity and blackened by pollution.
We eat at Chez Flore in the centre of town one night. Rich tomatoey fish stew and dark green pondu made from cassava leaves. Mounds of fluffy white rice and fufu, and a side of chikwangue - tangy rolls of fermented cassava dough. I eat a lot of greens, beans and fish in the DRC. It all seems so homegrown, hand gathered and healthy that I feel a spark of hope. Could food be the one part of life in the DRC that isn’t completely toxic? But then my colleague mentions that all the stews are made with palm oil (and palm oil bad).
The first time I went to Kinshasa, in 2023, it was an experience in expansion. Being medicated for anxiety and OCD allowed me to embrace the experience. I could live big. I could adventure. I could let go of the strict guidelines by which I lived back home and simply go with the flow. Do as others did... So rather than obsess about the layer of DEET I’d just lathered on my skin to keep the dozy clouds of mosquitoes at bay, I could reason with myself that it was the lesser of two evils (diethyltoluamide bad, malaria worse).
In an embarrassingly white kind of way, I was proud of myself for “roughing it”. But if I were to be kind with myself about that, I’d recognise that that trip truly was a victory in ERP - or exposure response prevention (a kind of cognitive behavioural therapy that involves exposing yourself to triggers and preventing compulsions).
But this time, the glow of my victory has worn off and I see the city not as an exercise in overcoming my demons, but as a city in and of itself. And it troubles me deeply.
A friend of mine, who has also spent time in Kinshasa, said it best. “I haven’t been able to find the words to describe the DRC and this sense of restlessness it’s created in me. But I think what I’m realising is that my sensibilities have changed. It could be temporary, but in the present I don’t feel able to interact with environments where citizens have been neglected by the state. At least to the degree in which I saw in Kinshasa.”
I too am struck by how little value is placed on the vulnerable bodies around me. Especially compared to the VIP treatment I receive as a white woman. In the DRC, I become precious cargo - passed from minder to minder, transported from relative safety to relative safety.
After listening long enough to the stories swirling around me on long drives and around dinner tables, I realise that safety simply isn’t available to Congolese folks. From what my colleagues tell me, there is no health insurance, no electricity in the hospitals, no reliable law enforcement. From what I can see, there are no safety regulations or roadworthy certificates. There are absolutely no guarantees or safety nets. And with ripples of the war in the North East reaching as far as Kinshasa, fear and suspicion hang in the air.
It makes me think of a quote from South African academic and writer, Njabulo Ndebele:
This is on the understanding that the ‘heart of whiteness’ will be hard put to reclaim its humanity without the restoration of dignity to the black body. We are all familiar with the global sanctity of the white body. Wherever the white body is violated in the world, severe retribution follows somehow for the perpetrators if they are non-white, regardless of the social status of the white body. The white body is inviolable, and that inviolability is in direct proportion to the global vulnerability of the black body. This leads me to think that if South African whiteness is a beneficiary of the protectiveness assured by international whiteness, it has an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history. It will have to come out from under the umbrella and repudiate it. Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies. South African whiteness will declare that its dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies.
When I travel to the DRC as a white person, I slide a toe out from under the umbrella’s protection. I’m precious cargo, yes, but also a soft vulnerable body amongst other soft vulnerable bodies, in a place that offers little protection, soaking up the ambient toxins and the oppressive atmosphere of collapse.
Stuck in another traffic jam, I look out at the wreckage of the city and think, “This is the collapse awaiting all nations on the other side of the climate crisis.” And I viscerally understand how my climate anxiety is white and privileged, because others are already living in the end times.
“I can’t wait to leave,” I think and cast my mind to where I call home. The rolling green forests and river valleys around my house. The way I can take the dogs for a walk and not see another soul. The way the air is so clean that lichen grows on everything - even my post box. The way our excesses are hidden in landfills. The way the insecurity Europe has sowed in its ex-colonies has created a relative haven where I can leave the keys in my electric car by accident and still find it waiting for me when I get back.
Ah yes… my electric car. My Righteous Consumer Choice. My illusion of purity, which simply displaces my toxic footprint from my neighbourhood (clean air good) back to the DRC where vulnerable bodies just like mine labour in the slave-like conditions of cobalt mines (toxic dust bad). All to ensure that I have a lithium ion battery to recharge.
My Congolese colleagues often speak of “une main noire” - a black hand of ill-intentioned foreign influence that maintains the country in a state of chaos, all the better to pillage it. I think of the American tech bros and their king, Elon Musk. They are responsible for my electric car. They care about treating their bodies like a temple - just like me. They treat inflammation with cold plunges - just like me. They like matcha and macadamia milk lattes with raw organic honey - just like me…
It’s clear from where I’m sitting on the back seat of this car in Kinshasa that the poor black body doesn’t get to be a temple.
When I finally sit down at my boarding gate at N'djili Airport, I struggle to reconcile it all: The call to repudiate the protectiveness of whiteness. The feeling that I never want to come back here again. And a nagging question: Does declaring that my dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies require that I cast aside my own safety in solidarity? Or could it look like extending the reach of safety and care to include all bodies?
But what exactly about my comfortable little life back in Europe is working towards making that a reality?
That friend of mine - the one who has also spent time in Kinshasa - once said to me that any white Southern African with a European passport will always have one foot in and one foot out. As long as we can leave, we will never, as Njabulo Ndebele says, “declare that [Southern Africa] is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies.”
The thing is, I left South Africa, in part, because my comfortable little life there only maintained the divisions between “good” and “bad” neighbourhoods. Between safe and unsafe spaces. The more I wanted to sit at a café with a view of Table Mountain to sip on a superfood smoothie, the more bouncers were required to keep unhoused kids from interrupting my breakfast. The more I wanted to sleep soundly at night, the higher the electric fences required to keep desperate people from breaking in…
If I am going to choose Europe, then perhaps I’ll need to find ways to create a soft landing for the vulnerable bodies washing up on its shores…